Christopher Whiteside MBE is the Conservative County Councillor for the Egremont North & St Bees Division of Cumbria County Council. The division includes St Bees, Bigrigg, Wood End, most of Moor Row, the Western part of the Mirehouse area of Whitehaven, and surrounding countryside.
Chris lives and works in Copeland with his wife and family.
Chris is a former member of Copeland Borough council, and an Honorary Alderman of the City and District of St Albans.

Monday, January 18, 2016

Was this the worst political interview of all time?

I still cannot credit how many utterly awful ideas there were in Jeremy Corbyn's interview with Andrew Marr yesterday - see reports
here (BBC) and here (Daily Mail).

For most politicians floating - if that isn't an unfortunate word - the idea of retaining the Royal Navy's Trident Missile submarines but without the warheads on the missiles would have been a gaffe that people would have been shouting about for weeks.

But it wasn't even one of the two worst ideas in the interview.

Nor was the idea of making "flying pickets" and "secondary strikes" legal again.

For those who don't remember how this sort of insanity nearly wrecked the British economy in the 1970's, that was when workers who were not remotely affected by or involved in an industrial dispute were allowed to strike "in sympathy" and send pickets.

E.g. you could have a situation where oil refinery workers go on strike and next thing you know the power workers and dockers are not just on stroke too and there are a thousand men, who would include not just refinery workers, but also dockers and power workers, standing outside every oil refinery, at best waving placards and shouting "scab" at anyone who tried to go in, in more extreme cases trying to block the entrances.

In my opinion the worst of the many dire comments in the interview was this:

Corbyn also suggested that the UK government should have "back channel" contacts with the so-called "Islamic State" or ISIS (who I prefer to call DA'ESH.)

Now, I can understand why we sometimes need to have back channel contacts with pretty unsavoury people, but anyone who thinks that trying to communicate with the self-styled Caliphate will achieve anything more than to put at risk the lives of whatever poor devils get tasked with making the contact, is living in a fantasy world. There is quite literally about as much point talking to DA'ESH as there would have been talking to Nazi Germany during World War II.

And he suggested we should try to reach a "reasonable accommodation" with Argentina over the Falkland Islands.

Goodness knows what that was supposed to mean but the Islanders voted by a couple of thousand to four to remain British and any suggestion that there might be any compromise in which their wishes might be overturned is not, in my opinion, remotely acceptable.

I seriously wonder whether this interview is a contender for the worst TV interview by a politician of all time.